Stop Letting LLMs Edit Your .bib Files — Citation Hallucination Now a Systemic Academic Problem

r/MachineLearning / GPTZero / Nature·medium signal

A 150-upvote r/MachineLearning post warns researchers about LLMs corrupting bibliography files, reporting hallucinated citations with correct titles but wrong authors appearing multiple times per month. This aligns with GPTZero's finding that 20% of ICLR 2026 submissions (60 of 300 sampled from 20,000) contain at least one AI hallucination, and Nature's estimate that tens of thousands of 2025 publications may include AI-fabricated references. The academic community is now treating LLM citation corruption as a research integrity crisis, not an edge case.